Qualcomm offer $10 million for whoever makes the first working Tricorder, Star Trek fans beam up
Qualcomm have an interesting new competition, named the Tricorder X PRIZE. It is jointly organised with the X PRIZE Foundation, who is famous for its Ansari X PRIZE award of $10 million for its first private suborbital space flight. Qualcomm is offering up $10 million to those who could take the concept of a highly-portable health-monitoring device, the Star Trek Tricorder, and make it real.
Peter Diamandis, chair and chief executive of the X PRIZE Foundation says:
Razer's Switchblade UI makes its way to standalone keyboard
Razer may have been showing off its expensive Blade laptop at CES, but for those of you who don't want to buy an entire laptop for their cool Switchblade UI configurable touchscreen with programmable keys, you're in luck, it's made it' way to a standalone keyboard.
There are 10 programmable buttons at the top of the Switchblade panel that are backed by an LCD, which allow the look of each key to be different. These keys can be programmed to launch applications, toggle functions like the Windows key, and execute macros. Below them is a nicely-sized touchscreen that doubles as a touchpad, a numpad, a directional pad optimized for gaming, and even a secondary display.
Razer has said they plan to release an SDK that should unleash the community to build their own applications for the Switchblade UI. Even at this point in time, there's a YouTube app and a web browser. Switchblade also supports on-the-fly macro recording, which lets users quickly automate combos without having to exit a game. All preferences and macros are stored in the cloud, another nice benefit.
Continue reading: Razer's Switchblade UI makes its way to standalone keyboard (full post)
NVIDIA Kepler coming in March or April, Team Green are building up stock for a hard launch
My birthday is in March and I'm pretty sure this is why NVIDIA are launching then, but the latest news is that NVIDIA does not want to paper launch the Kepler, so the launch of their first high-end Kepler part will only start once they have enough units for the first wave of customers.
NVIDIA originally had a Q1 2012 launch date in mind, with Quadro Kepler arriving in Q2 and Tesla Kepler arriving in Q3. But the new plans seem to indicate that NVIDIA will be launching the GeForce Kepler when they are able to ensure hard availability and have all of its partners covered.
AMD launched their GCN-based Radeon HD 7970 on December 22, 2011, but did not have any on retail shelves until closer to January 9th, 2012. NVIDIA does not want to repeat this and want to have stock availability in some what good numbers when they launch.
BitTorrent demos BitTorrentPlus client at CES - transcoding and home streaming
CES 2012 - One of my final meetings at CES was with the folks at BitTorrent in their suite at the Hilton hotel. We were given an introduction to some of the new features inside the latest version of the BitTorrentPlus client.
Brad from BitTorrent started by giving us a demo of "Disconnected" on the BitTorrentPlus client and its ability to transcode files that have been received through the BitTorrent network. He downloaded a torrent file (a .3gp file) from a mobile phone and while it's playable on a PC, it's not playable on other devices such as media players.
It's really a simple and quick process to convert the file, copy to a USB drive and then plug into a BT certified device (in this case a Blu-ray player) and playback the file which was converted from a .3gp file to a .mkv file which is supported by a vast amount of media players. No longer are you required to use third party tools which can be complex to convert files. It's all done within the BitTorrentPlus client.
ARM CEO says they won't be beaten by Intel on efficiency
Intel shook the hands of its two new partners at CES last week, with Lenovo and Motorola Mobility both at the hand-shaking end of that deal, where Intel also let ARM know its intentions of competing in the low-power consumption smartphone and tablet markets.
Lenovo went on to show off its K800 smartphone, sporting an Intel 32nm Medfield Atom Z2460 single-core processor with hyper-threading clocked at 1.6GHz. Motorola's product is currently in the final processes of preparation and is due to be delivered for carrier validation this summer.
Warren East, CEO of ARM, shrugs off Intel's attempt to strong arm them [that pun actually wasn't meant to be a pun, but I looked back and it works surprisingly well, so it stays] and says:
Continue reading: ARM CEO says they won't be beaten by Intel on efficiency (full post)
RumorTT: Intel-based Windows 8 tablets could start at just $600
You know what? Over the course of CES, I noticed I'm actually excited for something for once... what is it? Windows 8 tablets. I really think they could change things up this year, with full Windows capabilities, a next-gen, touch-based OS, proper touch-based tablets, it would really change things up against the kinda basic tasks the iPad can do compared to the powerhouse OS X. Anyway, DigiTimes is reporting that we could see Intel-based tablets starting at just $599.
This is due to Microsoft and Intel both willing to drop their related hardware and software quotes, as you can imagine, this will shave down the price considerably. This is of course, according to "sources from notebook vendors". DigiTimes never runs out of sources, up, down, and sideways from the supply chain, so I'm throwing some salt at you, now.
These same sources claim that Intel and Microsoft are struggling since if Microsoft drops its Windows 8, and Intel drops its Clover Trail-W prices, whilst this strategy could help raise Wintel-based tablet PC's market share, it could seriously damage pricing in the PC market and bring down both their margin performance.
Continue reading: RumorTT: Intel-based Windows 8 tablets could start at just $600 (full post)
Futuremark confirm Unstoppable Gorg release date, price and it will now be available on Apple Mac's
Futuremark Game Studio have just confirmed the release date and pricing for the PC and iPad versions of their upcoming orbital tower defense game, Unstoppable Gorg. In case you've forgotten what Futuremark's Unstoppable Gorg is all about, check out the gameplay trailer below.
Futuermark also announced that there is a previously unannounced version coming out, appearing on Apple Mac-based systems. On top of the newly announced Mac version, Unstoppable Gorg will be released on PC, XBLA, and the iPad. Futuremark Game Studio also announced today that Unstoppable Gorg will be released as a Steam Play title, which will let users buy it just once and play it on both the Mac and PC.
RELEASE DATES, PLATFORMS AND PRICES
Patriot's New Wildfire PRO and SE Play Hide and Seek
CES 2012 - This little bit of news had to wait till I arrived back at home since I don't carry a scanner with me on my work trips. In our meeting Patriot didn't mention the new additions but they were included in the product catalog we were issued. The Patriot Wildfire leap to the the top of our performance charts in our reviews and it was one of the finest drives of 2011. The Wildfire products also included all of the accessories we like to get with our SSDs and included a solid warranty.
First up is the Wildfire PRO model. The specs of this one are similar to the already reviewed Wildfire other than the user capacity. Patriot has changed the user capacity back to the previous overprovisioning rate found on early SandForce SF-1200 based products, 100GB, 200GB and 400GB. That leaves a lot of space for background tasks and that means these would work really, really well in RAID. Speaking of RAID, we're just about finished up with our RAID Report with 4 Patriot Wildfire 120GB drives that introduces a new test that will be in our 2012 reviews.
Next up is Wildfire SE. We have no idea what separates the SE from the standard Wildfire but we have some ideas. The original Wildfire used Toshiba 3Xnm Toggle Mode flash. Could this be one of the first SandForce drives with Toshiba 24nm flash? We think so but what the hell do we know.
Continue reading: Patriot's New Wildfire PRO and SE Play Hide and Seek (full post)
SOPA has been stalled, Johnny Drama yells "Victory!"
Entourage fan? If not, the title means nothing to you. YouTube it! Big news, SOPA has been stalled everyone, stalled! It was stalled due to a lack of 'consensus'. A lack of consensus with something so big going through Congress. Who would've thought!
The backlash from the Internet community with sites like Reddit against it, and the boycotting of companies that supported it like GoDaddy, have helped to force the pathetic bill to be stalled. On Saturday, the House Oversight Chariman, Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) was promised by Majority Leader, Eric Cantor (R-Va.) that the House won't vote on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) unless there is a consensus on the bill.
Issa said in a statement:
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The Pirate Bay steers away from torrents, sets sail for DHT
Ah, torrents. You used to be cool before everyone dived onto you, years ago, but as they have become mainstream, the target has been made. Torrents used to not be mainstream, and thus, the websites hosting them were pretty safe. Now I hear grandmas discussing how their son/daughter/friend/grandson "downloaded X or Y movie/TV show from 'the torrents'".
The Pirate Bay is one of the largest torrent-hosting sites on the Internet, and in a month from now, thepiratebay.org will remove all torrent files from its site, in favor for magnet links. This new move is what The Pirate Bay calls a "new future" in file sharing, consisting of true peer-to-peer sharing without the use of trackers.
TPB has already switched over to the underlying technology that runs alongside magnet links, with Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and Peer Exchange (PEX). TPB have been using magnet links with torrent files for a while now, without letting any of its users know.
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